In announcing that he’s moving from working on Android to working on identity at Google, Tim Bray mentions two things about identity:
Usernames and passwords generally suck and obviously don’t scale to the Internet, so we need to do away with ’em soonest.
The new technology coming down the pipe, OAuth 2 and friends, is way too hard for developers; there need to be better tools and services if we’re going to make this whole Internet thing smoother and safer.
If he can make progress in attacking these issues in his new role at Google, the Web will be a much better place.
July 1, 2012 at 12:40 pm
The third other issue is identity management for users who often want to have a number of identities. Identities are already coalescing, and there is a battle going on between the main authenticators, Google, Facebook, Disqus, Microsoft and the like. The theory is that we are going to wind up with ONE, but the fact is that users want to wind up with many, but not too many, where “too” depends on the technology they are provided with.